Japan falsified Whaling data

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not going to argue over the plight of the poor... gorilla poacher with you, and even if I were this wouldn't be the thread to do it in. What I will say is that if you're in a survival situation where you are out of "civilization" and part of the food chain, anything goes when it comes to endangered or threatened animals if you have to eat them to survive.

Well, in many cases the gorilla poacher could survive while doing something other than poaching gorillas... but they would survive less well. In an environment where "less well" can be literally anything up to the ragged edge of death, and where every single dollar makes a huge difference in quality of life, much more than it makes to you or me.

But that's a gazillion miles away from what we're actually talking about. I would suggest that land gorilla's have been driven out of due to poaching would probably grow some wicked reefer and if first would nations go their heads out of their asses on such matters they could make more money than they ever could poaching intelligent and sapient, species.

Mm. Unorthodox. Innovative. I don't want to be a downer, but... One problem.

I strongly suspect that if marijuana were grown and sold on the international market as a cash crop, its price would soon fall into line with that of the most similar product- tobacco. Marijuana has different effects than tobacco but causes a number of the same health problems (I suspect if anyone smoked as much marijuana as some people smoke tobacco, we'd have clear evidence of the risk that smoking it causes lung cancer). So demand would remain... rather finite. Like with tobacco.

Now, with tobacco, or cotton or any of a host of other plants, cash crop cultivation is already one of the few options sub-Saharan Africa has. But it doesn't seem to be a road out of poverty by itself. Sadly.

Your suggestion is very interesting, and it might help, but it wouldn't help a lot more than any of several other options that these people already (in theory) have.

Just out of morbid curiosity, if you or someone you cared about were starving, would you kill a gorilla to feed them?

I kinda want to answer this too.

No. I would not. Because killing a Gorilla is flat out, no-holds-barred murder. I might eat one if it was already dead from causes other than being killed for food, but I would do the same with a human under starvation conditions.

No no. I would eat the innumerable insects in easy reach wherever gorillas are likely to be present.

I now have an image of you persuading the gorilla to allow you to pick its nits or whatever pests the gorilla has.

I am not surprised by this given your known convictions (noting that obviously if you would not kill a gorilla to survive, you would not kill a gorilla to buy shoes for children et cetera).

If you did not think gorillas were, in your terms, sentient, would that affect your calculations? Would you kill a deer to survive? To put shoes on children's feet, et cetera?

Because we should probably remember that... I suspect most gorilla and elephant poachers do not think the animals they kill are of equal status to a human being, and regard it as no different than hunting and killing a deer or other such creature.

I mean, I strongly support efforts to maintain wildlife preserves in Africa, but there is a cold reality here that I'm not sure you're facing: a lot of Africans are really fucking poor. A lot of them- tens if not hundreds of millions- can't even live in the kind of basically sustainable subsistence-farming Iron Age lifestyle that their ancestors used to survive for thousands of years. Because the population's boomed so much that they're up to their eyeballs in teenagers who have minimal education and nobody can think of anything economically productive for them to do for the lack of infrastructure and resources.

Does not excuse murder. And wasteful self-destructive murder at that.

I do not believe it does, but if we proceed without understanding why the killings happen, the chance of actually stopping them is nil.

It is instead incumbent upon us (white people) who through colonial domination put them in that position, to raise them up out of desperate poverty.

I don't disagree, though I will note that the problem is vastly complicated by overpopulation of the land, to a level that has never been experienced by many First World societies, and certainly in not such a short timescale.

This does not remove the responsibility, but it does make things... interestingly complicated, shall we say.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I now have an image of you persuading the gorilla to allow you to pick its nits or whatever pests the gorilla has.

Nope! I have a rule. Never Eat Another Ape's Ectoparasites. That is a good way to contract various and sundry really horrible diseases.

If you did not think gorillas were, in your terms, sentient, would that affect your calculations? Would you kill a deer to survive? To put shoes on children's feet, et cetera?

Yes.

Because we should probably remember that... I suspect most gorilla and elephant poachers do not think the animals they kill are of equal status to a human being, and regard it as no different than hunting and killing a deer or other such creature.

That does not change the fact that they are. And while errors in fact are some mitigation, these people see these animals every day. They see them grieve their dead. I dont believe that the error is a good faith one. I think it is denial. With gorillas in particular the primatologists have been among the local human populations for decades. They know.

[Batman]

Some humans seem to have little issue with killing other 'humans' so I find this entirely unsurprising.

[Imperial Overlord]

That does not change the fact that they are. And while errors in fact are some mitigation, these people see these animals every day. They see them grieve their dead. I dont believe that the error is a good faith one. I think it is denial. With gorillas in particular the primatologists have been among the local human populations for decades. They know.

I think you're giving them too much credit for conscience. They aren't in denial, they're just callous. Callousness isn't unusual. Western countries only outlawed torturing and killing animals for sport relatively recently. The way some tribes treat their own dogs would be agonizing for most of us to witness.

On the plus side, some African countries have been spending some of the revenue gained from gorilla tourism locally, so the people around the gorilla benefit and know they benefit from the gorillas being alive and well.

[Flagg]

I'm not going to argue over the plight of the poor... gorilla poacher with you, and even if I were this wouldn't be the thread to do it in. What I will say is that if you're in a survival situation where you are out of "civilization" and part of the food chain, anything goes when it comes to endangered or threatened animals if you have to eat them to survive.

Well, in many cases the gorilla poacher could survive while doing something other than poaching gorillas... but they would survive less well. In an environment where "less well" can be literally anything up to the ragged edge of death, and where every single dollar makes a huge difference in quality of life, much more than it makes to you or me.

But that's a gazillion miles away from what we're actually talking about. I would suggest that land gorilla's have been driven out of due to poaching would probably grow some wicked reefer and if first would nations go their heads out of their asses on such matters they could make more money than they ever could poaching intelligent and sapient, species.

Mm. Unorthodox. Innovative. I don't want to be a downer, but... One problem.

I strongly suspect that if marijuana were grown and sold on the international market as a cash crop, its price would soon fall into line with that of the most similar product- tobacco. Marijuana has different effects than tobacco but causes a number of the same health problems (I suspect if anyone smoked as much marijuana as some people smoke tobacco, we'd have clear evidence of the risk that smoking it causes lung cancer). So demand would remain... rather finite. Like with tobacco.

Now, with tobacco, or cotton or any of a host of other plants, cash crop cultivation is already one of the few options sub-Saharan Africa has. But it doesn't seem to be a road out of poverty by itself. Sadly.

Your suggestion is very interesting, and it might help, but it wouldn't help a lot more than any of several other options that these people already (in theory) have.

Yeah, it's not simple. It's a very complex problem and the people that live in those areas are people I do feel very badly for. But if suddenly they could hunt all the gorillas they wanted, the species would go extinct and it wouldn't be an option at all, though I would make the argument that killing gorillas even were they a thriving species would be immoral simply due to their level of intelligence. But of course if they were a thriving species then they wouldn't be worth any more than whatever they can grow and sell as it is now, hence no simple solutions. It's just a drag all the way around and I think the international community should be doing more as far as aiding these people and areas by sponsoring infrastructure projects that will at least improve the peoples lives by even a small amount.